Dead Highways: Origins

by Richard Brown

  “They chased you onto the roof?”

  “Well, I ran to get to my Jeep, but then I changed my mind, thinking with the top down they’d have an easy time getting a hold of me. So I decided to go up on the roof. Luckily, I got up there before they came around the corner, so they never saw me. They wandered around for damn near thirty minutes wondering where I went, and then finally headed off. After I was sure they were long gone, I came down and got the rifle out of my Jeep and went to check on the person they had attacked. Unfortunately, though, I was too late. He was dead.”

  “We’ve had multiple close encounters ourselves,” I said.

  “Yeah, I heard. I don’t understand what’s happening to people. It was gonna be hard enough to get by when they were all in comas. Now that they’ve lost their minds . . .”

  “I just wonder where they’re going,” I said.

  “Why do you think they’re going somewhere?” Robinson asked. “And not just wandering around searching for their next victim.”

  “Because they’re all heading the same direction,” Naima said. “West.”

  “All of them? Really?”

  “Sure looks that way,” I said. “From what we saw on the drive over here.”

  “Huh. That’s strange,” Ted said. “I hadn’t really noticed which way they were going. Of course, I’ve been trying to lay low as much as possible. But now that I think of it, the three that chased me up on the roof had headed off west. Didn’t really think much of it at the time.”

  “So what are you suggesting we do, Jimmy?” Robinson asked. “Follow them?”

  “I wasn’t suggesting anything, certainly not to follow them. I was just wondering.”

  Robinson sighed. “Good thing. With the firepower we’ve got, we wouldn’t make it very far anyway.”

  “Speak for yourself,” Ted said.

  “What do you mean? I thought you got totally cleaned out?”

  “The store got cleaned out. I’ve got my own personal collection back at my house.”

  “How big?” Bowser inquired.

  “Come back to my place and see for yourself.”

  So we did.

  Ted led the way in his Jeep, followed by Robinson, and then me in the rear. Aamod and Naima rode with Robinson and Bowser this time so the Buick wouldn’t be so squished. Peaches, Olivia, Diego, and Luna, all stuck with me.

  Bad idea.

  It would be the last time I ever drove my grandma’s car.

  Chapter 35

  Ted gave no indication exactly how far his house was when we left. The route was easily the trickiest I’d had to drive thus far. We were on and off the pavement, twisting down roads I never even knew existed. Finally, we came to a major highway, and as I navigated through a particularly challenging maze of vehicles, I began to fall behind. Hundreds of infected crossed our path, further slowing me down. It didn’t help that my grandma may have bequeathed me the boxiest car made in the last thirty years. Before long, I could barely see Robinson in front of me.

  “We’re losing him!” Peaches shouted.

  “We’re not losing him!” I shouted back. “Wait . . . where did he go?”

  “Right there,” she said, pointing up to the left. “He’s turning.”

  I caught the red of Robinson’s brake lights just as he turned left off the highway.

  We came off on a narrow two-lane road with houses on both sides. The yards were large and the driveways long.

  I sighed. “Hopefully we’re close now.”

  Both hands on the wheel, I sped up. The posted speed limit was thirty-five. I was going fifty and climbing. With few cars blocking up the street, and no infected, this was my chance to catch up.

  Gradually, we gained on Robinson. As long as he didn’t turn off, we’d be okay. I wouldn’t let him out of my sight again.

  Just a little further.

  Then Peaches screamed, “Watch out!”

  But by the time I saw him, it was already too late.

  A man climbed out of a small ditch on the right-hand side and ran out into the center of the street. My first reaction was to hit the brakes and swerve to the left. Try to miss him.

  Didn’t work.

  I clipped him with the front bumper, causing him to roll off the side of the car, nearly taking the other side view mirror with him. There was a thump and a jolt inside the car, as some part of his body, probably an arm or leg, was run over by the back right tire.

  I tried to straighten the wheel to regain control of the car, but it was hopeless. The tires had lost their grip on the pavement, and we began to spin.

  My head whirled.

  Somebody in the car was screaming.

  We made at least one full rotation before taking out somebody’s mailbox, and then collided into a blue pickup truck.

  After that, everything went dark.

  The next thing I knew my head was in the clouds.

  Floating.

  It felt like it had become disconnected from my body, and maybe it had.

  My first thought was . . .

  I’m dead.

  This is what death feels like . . . hollow and black and . . .

  Then I heard something.

  Something high-pitched, whining far off in the distance, far beyond the dark clouds I floated on.

  I wanted to tell it to shut up, but I’d forgotten how to speak.

  Or . . . the dead don’t talk.

  The sound gets louder and louder.

  The sound of hell. It had to be.

  I was in hell.

  And that sound was billions of tortured souls crying out for redemption.

  Crying out for an end to the pain.

  So familiar. So close now.

  Getting close.

  Getting closer.

  Getting louder.

  I could hear it perfectly now. So clear.

  It wasn’t billions of souls, but only one.

  A baby, crying.

  I had to help her. I had to get off this cloud and redeem myself.

  And it was then that I saw a sliver of light open up, and the clouds began to part.

  The world was out of focus. Fuzzy.

  The light was painfully bright, but I allowed more of it in. Slowly. A little at a time. I needed to be whole again—to be reconnected with my body. In order to do that, I had to get to the baby, wherever it was. I had to redeem myself.

  It was the only way out of this hell.

  I don’t know how long it took me to open my eyes, but when I finally did, I was immediately thrust out of the dreary underworld of incomprehension and back into the real world of anguish and enlightenment.

  I lifted my head from the airbag (the cloud) that had saved me, and looked around.

  Peaches was beside me in the passenger seat. She was moaning, coming awake slowly just as I had. The passenger side airbag had also deployed.

  But where was Olivia? She was still alive. I could hear her crying.

  Peaches pushed the airbag out of the way and reached down between her feet. A second later, she came up with the baby. Olivia had a few small cuts on the right side of her head. Blood covered her ear and ran down her neck.

  “Shhh. It’s okay. Shhh.” Peaches rocked Olivia against her shoulder trying to get her to calm down. It wasn’t happening. Olivia seemed to cry even harder than before.

  In the backseat, Diego and Luna were waking up.

  “What happened?” Luna asked groggily. She lifted a hand to her forehead where a good-sized bump was developing. A small amount of blood trickled out of her nose. She had probably head-butted the front headrest.

  Diego massaged his shoulder, wincing in pain. “Baby, are you okay?”

  “Yeah, I think. It’s just . . . my head hurts.”

  Diego leaned over and pulled his fiancée close to him.

  Meanwhile, Peaches began wiping away the blood from Olivia’s head.

  “How does it look?” I asked.

  “The cuts ain’t too deep. But we gotta get this
bleeding under control.”

  Olivia agreed. She was crying bloody murder.

  “Just keep pressure on it.”

  I sat up, looked around. The windshield had cracked in a dozen places. The front end of the Buick was smashed in like a crinkled-up soda can, its metal body merged with the blue pickup. Not surprisingly, the car had shut off during the wreck. A light smoke rose from the engine compartment.

  “We should probably get out of the car,” I said. “What if the engine is on fire?”

  Everyone looked forward, watched as the smoke grew thicker, blanketing the outside of the car in a grey fog.

  Inside the car, I began to smell it. The scent of burning oil.

  “Come on,” I said. “We’ve got to go.”

  We all got out at the same time.

  Not a second later, we all wished we hadn’t.

  Beyond the smoke was a circle of eight people, surrounding the car. Six men. Two women. And I knew instantly they weren’t here to help us. They all had their hands down at their sides, and on each of their faces was the unique expression of indifference they would make famous. They, the infected. They wouldn’t smile. They wouldn’t gloat. Even though they knew they had us trapped.

  Before any of us could mutter a syllable, they rushed in on us, two apiece. I suppose I was lucky, as the two who came for me were probably two of the smallest of the group, and direct opposites. One was a girl no more than fourteen or fifteen years old. The other was an old man close to my grandma’s age. He had crazy white hair, pale skin, and was bone thin, like a Q-tip with arms and legs.

  Even with the body of a fifteen-year-old girl myself, I was able to fight them off rather easily, as they attempted to pull me down to the ground. I leaned back against the car door and kicked the girl in the chest. She slipped and fell backward into the ditch. Then I worked on prying the old man’s dinosaur claws off my shirt and pushed him aside. Beside me, Diego was struggling with his pair. Both men. Both much larger than him.

  I opened the car door back up and went for Sally between the seat and the center console. But she wasn’t there. She must have become dislodged during the crash.

  I climbed into the car, searched around the floor in the front. The only thing I found down there was a box of travel tissues and an old roll of Mentos—the freshmaker. My grandma loved those darn things.

  Behind me, somebody’s once-beloved grandpa set his claws on the back of my Harry Potter shirt and tried to yank me out of the car. I turned and pushed him away, and then lunged into the backseat. She, my Sally, had to be back there.

  The old man climbed into the front seat. If nothing else, he was a persistent old badger. Probably a war vet.

  Those fuckers never give up.

  I ended up finding Sally by the back windshield, of all places. I fumbled with the slide. Checked that the safety was off. Ready to fire.

  The old man struggled to get between the seats. He had his arms outstretched, trying to grab hold of me, but I was just beyond his reach.

  I pointed the gun at his head. “Back off!”

  He didn’t back off. He tried even harder to get me between his wrinkly old fingers.

  “This is your last chance,” I said. “Back the fuck off!”

  Again, he didn’t listen. Maybe he was hard of hearing, or just didn’t believe that I would pull the trigger. Most likely, he had no clue what a gun was or what would happen if he didn’t do as I said.

  I actually felt sympathy for him.

  He should be spending his retirement doing something nice and relaxing like, I don’t know, visiting the Grand Canyon in one of those fancy power wheelchairs—like in the television commercials. Instead, he’s asking me to paint his brains all over the interior of my grandma’s car.

  But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Not to a war hero.

  I opened the back passenger door and got out. Peaches, and the two who had attacked her, had disappeared. Luna, as well. Diego was still struggling on the ground on the other side of the car.

  The young girl saw me come around and ran straight at me.

  I raised the gun. Fired.

  Two shots in the chest, just like Ted had taught me.

  She went down instantly.

  The gunshots had alerted the other two fighting with Diego. They stopped and raised their heads just enough to give me a clear shot.

  Thanks boys.

  A moment later, they rolled off Diego, blood spurting from the holes in their heads.

  “Gracias,” Diego said.

  “We have to find the girls,” I said, helping him to his feet.

  “Where are they?”

  “If I knew that, we wouldn’t have to find them.”

  Then I heard a female scream, and I looked up. Peaches was on top of the blue pickup, cradling Olivia. A man and a woman were climbing up after her. I raised the gun, wanted to take a shot. But it was too risky.

  Behind me, Diego was limping along like a zombie, yelling for Luna.

  Peaches was yelling at me. “Jimmy, help!”

  I stepped out on the street to get a better angle, and that’s when I saw the rest of the infected—dozens—coming down driveways, through yards. I saw something else too, down the road off in the distance, but moving fast.

  Two cars.

  A police car and a Jeep.

  I raised the gun again, took aim, and fired at the woman closest to Peaches.

  Missed.

  I fired again and hit her in the shoulder.

  Robbie “Road Rash” Robinson took out three or four people with the car before he came to a stop. Ted pulled up alongside him twenty yards away, stood on the front seat of his Jeep with the bolt-action rifle pressed against his shoulder, and began firing away.

  One down. Two down. Three down.

  “Luna!” Diego cried out, crossing the street. Just as someone would get within ten or fifteen feet of him, Ted would shoot them down.

  The guy was a sniping machine.

  Peaches passed me Olivia so she could safely get down from the truck.

  Robinson got out of the car and ran over. I handed him my gun. It didn’t feel right holding Olivia and Sally at the same time. It felt dangerous.

  “How many shots you got?”

  “I don’t know. Not many.”

  Bowser and Aamod stayed by the cars, covering Ted while he reloaded.

  Peaches jumped down from the bed of the truck.

  “Do you want me to take her?”

  “No, I got it,” I said. “Just stay close by.”

  Even with all the gunfire, Olivia had finally stopped crying. I checked the side of her head. The cuts had stopped bleeding, and it didn’t look like she had any swelling. Both positive signs.

  “Move out of the way,” Robinson said.

  Staggering along from behind the Buick was old white hair. The war hero. He would never quit. Until Robinson put a few holes in his chest. Then he grunted and toppled into a sad ball on the ground.

  Only a few of the infected remained. Most lay all over the road like scattered trash blown around during a storm.

  “Nooooooo!”

  It was Diego. He was on the other side of the street looking into the small ditch.

  A moment later, two men popped up and knocked him to the ground.

  We all ran over to help, including Ted, who quickly jumped down from the Jeep.

  I stayed back, out of the firing line.

  Bowser, out of bullets, grabbed one of the guys and hit him so hard in the stomach I was surprised the man didn’t vomit all over himself. The man fell to his knees, took the blunt end of Bowser’s pistol to the top of his head, and then fell the rest of the way. Robinson grabbed the second guy by the back of his shirt and lifted him off Diego. Then he pushed him out of the way, and with no hesitation, fired a bullet into the back of the man’s head.

  Diego rolled over, his face a bloody mess, and tried to stand up. Robinson helped him on the second attempt.

  We all looked down in t
he ditch.

  Luna lay at the bottom, arms splayed, facing up.

  Not moving.

  Robinson and Diego climbed down the ditch and began checking to see if she was alive.

  “She’s not breathing,” Robinson finally said. He had to yell at Diego to back off so he could administer CPR.

  Up on the street, Ted continued to keep watch of our position, picking off any infected who wandered within fifty yards.

  “What happened?” Naima asked.

  “We got ambushed,” Peaches said.

  Aamod finally felt comfortable enough to lower his shotgun. “You were supposed to stay behind us.”

  “We were behind you. If you hadn’t noticed, we got into a little accident. Almost died ourselves.”

  I had nothing to say. It wasn’t a time for words. I was scared for Luna, scared for Diego. I couldn’t take my eyes off Robinson down below. He was now doing another round of mouth-to-mouth. His officer training put to good use. Any moment now, I expected Luna would pop up, heaving for air.

  Come on.

  Just this once.

  Finally, Robinson stopped and stood up. Diego was on the ground next to his fiancée, his arms around her, trying to talk her back into life.

  “Please, baby,” he cried. “Don’t leave me. I need you. I can’t live without you. Please, baby. Please.” He looked up at Robinson, his face covered in blood and tears. “Is there nothing else you can do?”

  Robinson shook his head. “I’m sorry.”

  Diego held her tighter, shut his eyes, and began talking to her in Spanish. The same line, over and over again. “Te amaré por siempre. Mi novia. Te amaré por siempre.”

  I’ll love you forever.

  My sweetheart.

  I’ll love you forever.

  Chapter 36

  Five heartbreaking minutes later.

  After the massacre that had left a few dozen infected dead in the road and surrounding lawns, the number of helpless souls willing to make a run at us slowed immensely. Those that did show themselves often hid behind fences or trees, keeping their distance, but keeping their eyes on us all the same.